advice and resources, thoughts and inspirations, networking and global education. (and that includes Basingstoke!)

Thursday, 28 May 2009

the great TWITTER debate

As a late arrival to this community, I have sometimes seemed over enthusiastic. But there are so many silly things said about what goes online, as well as some very silly twitterers. But I don't think people in education have seen what we can all do with this. Lots of pioneers but the wagons are a long way behind.

So some initial thoughts while they are still in my head.

1. Did some searching for refs to BASINGSTOKE and discovered some useful ideas and people and one twitterer who had nothing to say but had over 1000 followers! Its really easy to see why people who just dip their toes in the water get the wrong impression.

2. On the day of the SOUTH AFRICA elections in April, I watched the voting on BBC News24, SkyNews and AlJazeera. All interesting but not nearly as informative as the tweets from people actually lining up to vote. People in Cape Town were telling each other via TWITTER what queues were the longest and heading off for another station.

The Guardian correspondent in Africa wrote stuff for the paper but in his tweets he gave us much more interesting info. (@SmithinAfrica) . Where else could you get descriptions of what was happening as people arrived for ZUMA's slightly premature celebration party that evening? And I was able to pass on to those who were interested, what the media in the UK was reporting. Some of it was just plain inaccurate.